CRM magazine presents the Service Leaders awards to the most impressive providers of customer care architecture, technology, and services who have worked tirelessly over the past year to improve their capabilities so that contact centers can go about their crucial business more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

CRM magazine presents the Service Leaders awards to the most impressive providers of customer care architecture, technology, and services who have worked tirelessly over the past year to improve their capabilities so that contact centers can go about their crucial business more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

CRM strategists often speak of improving company performance by boosting revenue on a per-customer basis. CRM magazine cuts through the hype to examine what individual customer profitability can--and cannot--do for your business.

Companies are applying Six Sigma to sales and marketing processes, looking for those characteristics of an opportunity that have the greatest chance of success, or those leads that show the hallmarks of quality.

Siebel has provided analytic capabilities to customers for some time, but the new Siebel Business Analytic Applications collection is designed to run both in Siebel user environments and other business scenarios.

Published reports quote PeopleSoft Director Steven Goldby as saying, "If there's an indication that they would pay what we consider to be the right price, and there's a possibility that we could close the transaction quickly, I'm open to discussions with Oracle."

Part of the freedom to improve ROI calculations arrived as CRM became more pervasive within whole organizations, and was not simply relied on to provide domino effects from individual groups like the sales and support organizations.

Brand building was ranked highest among marketing priorities, despite the strong positioning efforts many vendors employed during the tech boom; the brand-building efforts may reflect both fresh faces and survivors looking to establish new markets.

Being able to compete on equal footing with contact center giants is important as the customer contact market shifts to longer purchase cycles driven by the need for technology refresh, rather than hordes of startups demanding quick solutions.

The time has come once again for CRM magazine to reward excellence and achievement among vendors in the CRM industry. CRM vendors have individually and collectively worked to build confidence in the discipline, and those efforts are paying off. According to AMR Research, companies are still making modest-but-measurable increases in their spending on customer management tools and strategies, to the tune of an additional $600 million in spending expected for 2004. Interest is strongest among midmarket and SMB firms, which we classify as those companies under $1 billion and under $100 million in annual revenues, respectively. But there was plenty to stir things up this year. Read on to see what companies prevailed from 2003, and how others are leaving an indelible mark on the industry.

The time has come once again for CRM magazine to reward excellence and achievement among vendors in the CRM industry. CRM vendors have individually and collectively worked to build confidence in the discipline, and those efforts are paying off. According to AMR Research, companies are still making modest-but-measurable increases in their spending on customer management tools and strategies, to the tune of an additional $600 million in spending expected for 2004. Interest is strongest among midmarket and SMB firms, which we classify as those companies under $1 billion and under $100 million in annual revenues, respectively. But there was plenty to stir things up this year. Read on to see what companies prevailed from 2003, and how others are leaving an indelible mark on the industry.

The time has come once again for CRM magazine to reward excellence and achievement among vendors in the CRM industry. CRM vendors have individually and collectively worked to build confidence in the discipline, and those efforts are paying off. According to AMR Research, companies are still making modest-but-measurable increases in their spending on customer management tools and strategies, to the tune of an additional $600 million in spending expected for 2004. Interest is strongest among midmarket and SMB firms, which we classify as those companies under $1 billion and under $100 million in annual revenues, respectively. But there was plenty to stir things up this year. Read on to see what companies prevailed from 2003, and how others are leaving an indelible mark on the industry.

In a six-nation survey of nearly 6,000 individuals, Americans gave their highest level of satisfaction to postal services, banks, and utility companies--none of which earned the approval of even half the survey base.

Among the advances in SalesLogix 6.2 are more tightly coupled sales and customer service capabilities, better access to opportunity data (including new-opportunity analytics), improved language support, and an expanded roster of customizable features.

Call center outsourcing can provide value to an organization, but not by walking away from responsibility. We examine the people, process, and technology issues managers should consider when making their decision.

Marketers do understand the problems they need technology to help solve. Particularly among companies with a B2C component to their business, nearly four in five nominated channel management as a problem. Of those firms seeing channel management challenges, it was their highest-ranked issue.

Going public creates a new set of challenges for Salesforce.com. Not only must its management continue to comply with ongoing and increasingly complex disclosure regulations, but it must also contend with the overnight wealth enjoyed by the company's currently faithful employees.

Pivotal's basic email client has been improved, with closer integration with Outlook 2003; the SmartPortal system has been expanded to a more open interface, allowing easier third-party data integration.

The combined company expects $125 million in 2004 revenues, and says that accelerated growth in the former Phase 2 operations will lead to the creation of 500 jobs in U.S. operations over the next year and a half.

Growing economies in tier 2 and 3 regions, ranging from western Europe to South Africa, will create higher demand for domestic call center services, while aggressive technological catch-up will make eastern European call centers prime providers of customer care outsourcing.

Hosted services are showing up on the radar of the Global 1,000, and are seeing increasing uptake among large organizations looking to plug holes in their CRM deployments, either as a cost savings over additional licenses of a conventional CRM system or to improve adoption.

A new global study by KnowledgeStorm and The AlignIT Group reveals that while offshore call centers and contract programming continue to provide positive returns for many businesses, many other industries are seeing only mixed results from offshoring efforts.

According to research firm Datamonitor, in 2003 call centers worldwide spent nearly $700 million on workforce optimization systems. Based on vendor projections and other industry factors, Datamonitor expects that figure to rise to $1.2 billion by 2008.

The Elite award honors customer companies that have gained impressive returns on their customer service investments. Winners were selected based on return on investment, project implementation times, and overall impact on the organization.

To understanding the potential return on an outsourcing arrangement is to first understand the inefficiencies and challenges facing your current customer contact solution and then to set targets for the outsourcer to meet to improve the situation.

CRM magazine investigated the depth of CRM expertise and adoption at the companies selling the technology by interviewing executives at several leading developers, ranging from large, traditional vendors to up-and-coming hosted providers.

Driven by everything from sophisticated tools to brutal cost pressures, the role of the contact center agent is changing, in large part to create more business value from a smaller, more highly skilled workforce.

BJC HealthCare's after-hours pediatric-nursing help line looked to improve performance and cut costs for the triage service; Memorial Hermann has been working on CRM improvement plans to boost customer service capabilities; and Franciscan Health System works with Customer Potential Management Marketing Group to maintain and mine an extensive customer database.

The identity of the ultimate new owner remains up in the air as Onyx earlier this month made a richer stock-only offer to acquire Pivotal and CDC Software last week announced its own bid for the company.

The laws focus primarily on the most heinous practices of shady spammers like deceptive subject lines, lack of opt-out provisions, disguising the source of the email, and delivering pornographic materials with no warning.

Two divisions that serve The Schwan Food Company's markets, Schwan's Home Service and Schwan's Food Service Group, have revamped their CRM strategies as part of Schwan's ongoing effort to keep customers satisfied and loyal.

Siebel says that the lion's share of R&D will be dedicated to reducing the running expenses--it turns out that the vast majority of IT dollars goes into the ongoing care and feeding of enterprise applications.

In a poll of 111 corporate decision-makers at firms with more than $500 million in annual revenues, three quarters of the survey group expressed satisfaction with its CRM results. The largest obstacle to success, cited by nearly half the survey group, was corporate resistance to the process changes that come as part of a CRM transformation.

Siebel says it worked from press releases and 2002 earnings reports from competitors, filling in the blanks with published 2001 data and customer-analytics industry-growth projections; one industry analyst notes, however, that formal 10-K reports will not be available until March, and favors a more deliberate approach to declaring leadership.

A numbers debate has some in the industry squirming around the question of declaring either SAP or Siebel the true leader, which should prove interesting if and when Siebel or another firm starts declaring CRM revenues in excess of SAP's numbers in an upcoming quarter.

Jets or Giants? Coke or Pepsi? The first two are a matter of taste. But how your business acquires the technological core of its CRM strategy cannot be simply about preference. Here's how to make the right choice between implementing a packaged solution and using internal or external IT resources to build one.

No customer wants to be offered something that cannot be delivered for the advertised price or lead time. That makes supply chain management (SCM) an attractive proposition for an enterprise looking to improve its production and back-end efficiencies. Simply put, money saved by improving customer services and by better coordinating the flow of piece parts and finished product is money earned.

CRM faced its first real economic challenge in 2001. We examine the losses and victories of the year and take a hard look to see if CRM's greater ideals are being lost amid revenue warnings and profit-scavenging.

Experts say that lofty CRM visions of complete customer understanding are impossible to achieve without a solid analytical framework. How are analytical CRM providers bridging the gap between ambition and reality?

Guided selling applications can automate the process of steering a customer to the product that's right for both them and for the manufacturer. But they don't come cheap and require serious institutional self-enlightenment.

Choosing the right sales force for your CRM-savvy company means more than just finding people who know the software. The new sales person must be willing to farm existing customers as well as chase down new ones

Both the evidence and the experts suggest that knowledge management initiatives and tools should not be among the cuts. Processes that extract and save knowledge and make it available to other employees--even if there are fewer of them--can ease the impact of contraction on a company.

Building and maintaining a qualified staff is a constant challenge. Atlanta-based Simtrex offers its answer in Star Trainer, a voice-interactive call center simulation environment that attempts to train and reinforce agents with repeatable, real-world skills and tasks.

The electronic banking trend offers many conveniences, but also presents customer satisfaction and customer retention challenges. As banks are getting more wired, the call center is becoming a crucial component for banking industry success.

A suite of software from Redwood City, Calif.-based Kana Communications helps eBay process its customer service e-mail. The Kana system sorts incoming e-mail messages into queues based on the subject line and a referral tag determined by what the customer was doing on the site when the e-mail was sent.

The electronic banking trend offers many conveniences, but also presents customer satisfaction and retention challenges. As banks are getting more wired, the call center is becoming a crucial component for banking industry success.

While marketing automation processes might have been used as budget fillers in the past, new applications that enable companies to measure individual customer-based ROI have the potential to vault marketing departments into the realm of revenue generators.

While marketing automation processes might have been used as budget fillers in the past, new applications that enable companies to measure individual customer-based ROI have the potential to vault marketing departments into the realm of revenue generators.